–“Q: Curt: What’s your prediction on Turkey?”– Jarl
Turkey is a “torn country”: civilizational because it’s a borderland, and demographically because a future Kurdistan is a long term necessity. So deterministically we can see a direction but not an outcome.
Oddly, Turks are largely genetically Greek (old europe) with limited genetic contribution of Turks (asiatics+iranics). While the Kurds are an Iranic people. This means there is a conflict between genetic capacity (Europe), culture (Turkish), and demographics (Kurdish).
So there is a strong incentive for Constantinople-Byzantium-Istanbul to maintain imperial control over people and territory. And they happen to be in one of the most valuable pieces of real estate: a toll bridge between Europe, the Middle East, and asia.
However, the Turkish government is actually capable with enough secularism, and enough of an economy, that it has the potential to dominate the region forming a competitor to Iran’s imperial ambitions. and restoring the balance between north Africa, the kingdoms, Iran, turkey and the catastrophe that is and always will be the syrian-lebanese-israeli-palestinian coast.
At present, Iran’s ambitions are obvious which Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Kurdistan bits of the caucuses, Iran, from the med, to the black sea, to the Caspian, to the Persian gulf to the Indian ocean. And while their fundamentalist government is a kleptocratic disaster that’s having the same negative effect on the people as did Islam’s fundamentalist shift over a thousand years ago, their strategic ambitions are logical and somewhat in everyone in that region’s interest as a rule-of-law federation even if not a muslim empire of ignorance.
So the future of Turkey? Demographics and geography produce economics produce geostrategy. So turkey could shrink or expand. Hard to tell. I have a hard time imagining turkey not continuing to turn back to the ME and away from Europe, and not asserting it’s dominance in the region, simply by virtue of better geography, genetics, institutions, and economy.
I am still having difficulty imagining that we will not see a return to nationalization and the conflict of civilizations as the west ends it’s project of trying to civilize and modernize the rest of the world – a world unwilling and often incapable of it without our ‘government’ if not rule.
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